I’m happy for Joss Whedon, after hearing the announcement he’ll write and direct Avengers 2. I like to see a geek inherit the Earth.

But I worry about the franchise in general. Whedon has a tendency to make his villains too comfortable around the heroes. Considering he worked with vampires so long, I’m surprised how quickly he removes his villains’ teeth and makes them just ordinary guys and gals. Perhaps he just likes villains better, like Dr. Horrible. But I’m afraid that, in Avengers 2, Loki will be joining the heroes for a shawarma dinner.

Which one is better?

In the beginning…

Later on…

Spike from Buffy

Dangerous. You never knew what side he was on.

Just kind of hung around because he had nothing else to do.

Danger from X-Men

Living embodiment of the Danger Room. Coolest and most deadly new villain in the mutant titles.

Just kind of hung around and poked fun of the heroes because she had nothing else to do.

Wandering through Target with my daughter, she stopped me for the new Lego line “Friends.” It’s a pack of cute, Lego-sized dolls where you built them and their play sets. Brilliantly simple idea and a fine execution.

She asked me to read the descriptions of the four girls on display. What took me by surprise was that they actually had negative sides of their personalities. One of them loves to plan parties, but she can be bossy. One of them loves to perform, but is a bit of a drama queen.

This, I thought, was fantastic. Most of the times, personalities for kids’ toys are very straight and narrow. They never have a bad side to them. “This one loves animals and the color pink!” That’s about as much as you’ll get from some of them.

It’s so bad that the “books” that are put out to support the toys (or do the toys support the books?) just pick a toy as the main character and put words in her mouth. The characters are that interchangeable that it just doesn’t matter who says or does anything.

So I was pleasantly surprised that, in just a few short sentences, the Lego Friends were well described and set up enough things for them to do.What I Learned: For a story to happen, there has to be conflict. The best conflict comes from between characters. But they have to be different enough for that to happen.

The recordings can’t be live. And they have to be something that sounds like it would be the background to a scene in a movie. It has to convey an emotion without being distracting.

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Like this:

I just finished writing a board book, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. This is the first time I’ve been so actively thinking about publishing trends while writing, and it feels kind of hollow because of that.

For example, I wanted to make the main character, a puppy, female. But I thought about readership levels. Girls will read books about boy characters. But boys won’t read books about girl characters. So I made the puppy a boy. It’s only a board book, so maybe that doesn’t matter.

In one part, the puppy waves a stick, pretending it’s a magic wand. Just this week, my daughter took a stick to the face from a boy waving one around. It wasn’t intentional, he was running toward her, like “Hey, look at this great stick!” She got a scratch and a bruise. And she could’ve got poked in the eye, but she didn’t. So I didn’t make a big deal of it. But I know that lots of parents refuse to let their kids play with sticks. So I changed it so the puppy was playing with a leaf, pretending it was a magic wand.

I felt very shallow making these changes. It wasn’t like my super hero, Epic, who I consciously changed to female because I saw a lack of strong female super heroes. With that change, it just felt right. These, not so right.